All scientists should be storytellers. Data is impotent when buried in bad writing.

As a biochemistry major, I know all too well about the scientists with terrible writing skills. They're slowly making taking first year English classes mandatory for all the sciences which is a step, I guess.

Comments like this are funny because of how naive they are. Of course there is at least some jargon, which is necessary for ease of communication within a field. Instead of setting up the logic behind a litany of concepts and assumptions we can refer to them formally and everyone in the field knows what we're talking about.

Edit: That being said, if I'm writing a pop science piece, of course I avoid jargon. But in scientific journal articles it's necessary.

See, now I knew you were going to cone back with that. Look up "jargon" in a dictionary, and note it has a common and a technical definition. We are talking about the common definition. You horned in with a false mix up with the technical definition. It's pedantic, derailing, and quite disingenuous.

When talking about technical writing among professionals surely the technical definition is the correct one to use. A person who can't deploy technical jargon is as unable to communicate with fellow professionals as one that lacks writing skills.

They should strive to avoid jargon that is meaningless or that detracts from their thesis, but not all jargon.

The writer needs to write to the technical level of their audience, that naturally requires differing levels of technical language. The writer needs the skills to determine where jargon is appropriate and where it is inappropriate.

jar·gon1 ˈjärɡən/ noun special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.

Oxford: jargon1 NOUN

1[mass noun] Special words or expressions used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand:

Merriam Webster:

Definition of jargon 1 a : confused unintelligible language b : a strange, outlandish, or barbarous language or dialect c : a hybrid language or dialect simplified in vocabulary and grammar and used for communication between peoples of different speech 2 : the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group

You're the one being disingenuous. Obviously when we're talking about terminology used within a specific field, jargon is a meaningful synonym. Trying to make some distinction between "terminology used within a specific field" and "jargon" is you being pedantic and me using a synonym........

I've seen this happen with scientific writing. My girlfriend edits scientific papers for foreign scientists trying to publish in US journals, and she runs into this problem a lot. The author or her supervising editor freaks out when she changes sections that are more complicated than they need to be, because they're convinced the jargon is essential to be taken seriously as a publishing scientist.

That too. But technical writing helps with expressing ideas clearly in succinctly. This is undoubtedly important, but I argue that there is benefit to be had by also studying fiction writing to a certain degree. Not to emulate it 1-to-1, but to learn some ways in which to improve the ability to frame scientific issues in engaging and meaningful ways.

Technical research professionals (scientists, engineers, mathematicians, doctors, psychologists, etc) should learn some basic fiction writing techniques for when communicating to laymen who want to learn about the paper's topic, but don't know all of the specific terminology and concepts. The best way to do this is to grow their interest by appealing to their entertainment and their imagination, rather than their scientific knowledge and reasoning. I'm not calling laymen dumb. It's more like everyone who has a smart phone: everyone loves what new and innovative things the phones can do, but most don't want to sit in a lecture hall learning about communications technologies, fourier transforms, modulation/demodulation, bandwidth, digital signal processing, filtering, etc. This concept and practice is key to fiction writing: don't bog down the story with meaningless exposition about technology and science. Show the readers how that technology and science can be used in interesting new exciting ways.

Researcher-to-Researcher, it's less necessary to do so, because researchers want to know the low level scientific details behind everything. These people are performing the peer reviews, so they have to know everything about it.

A couple things to consider. One, Freshman English is often a prerequisite for technical writing classes. Obviously that requirement could be changed, but there's likely a good reason for it existing in the first place.

Two, Freshman English classes are primarily focused on argumentative essays. The basic format of an assignment being: read this piece, take a position on it, and then defend that position. That sort of communication - an argumentative essay- can be applied to a variety of other fields that have nothing to do with fiction. Studying fiction writing* in that way involves dissecting the source material and understanding exactly how it works. That in turn should allow students to apply fiction writing techniques to enrich their own writing. And of course, that's exactly the sort of science writing that the linked article was advocating for.

*Freshman English course do not exclusively study fiction writing. Besides including material based on other forms of writing (everything from poetry to journalism), these classes will also cover basic English usage, grammar, and syntax at least in passing. The purpose of an freshman English class is the study of using English to communicate after all.

I think there's a problem at both ends. Scientists need to become better writers, but the scientific publishing industry also needs to alter its standards to encourage scientific writing that's more accessible to the general public. Just a bit, though. We do need to aggressively police the standards for meaningful evidence in support of one's conclusion. I've seen too many medical studies that blatantly fail at proving the hypothesis, but nonetheless get published and cited as proof.

I dunno, as a scientist I personally think it should be. To be an effective scientist you have to have a well rounded skill set. Literally every single person I met when I was in undergrad (and even grad for the most part) not only hated writing, but was "scared" of it and had no idea how to do it effectively. Most people who got their science degrees chose all science courses for their electives; I can't stress to you enough how 1 dimensional their skills are. When I was TAing, the short answer questions were appalling to mark, the vast majority of answers were nearly unintelligible and barely english.

TAing in a huge class, for me, a huge part of that was foreign ESL students. It was really hard to figure out how they even got accepted. I would have the same 6 kids all submit the same, wrong, unintelligibly written answer on the test...

Nothing ever came of it. They always seemed to get a free pass on cheating because they were foreign. It was written off as a cultural misunderstanding.

But god knows what they were doing in dendochronology if they couldn't even write a grammatically correct sentence.

In my last time TAing my course (an upper year course too) I caught tons of them cheating exactly as you described but nothing came of it because unless the answers were identical you can't prove its cheating apparently. Lol. Such a joke. I mean don't get me wrong we used to discuss our assignments and stuff when I was in undergrad but it's not like we just couldnt be arsed to answer a couple questions with original responses.

I don't think expecting intelligible English makes me racist/xenophobic but maybe I'm wrong and I'm just a shitlord

No! It absolutely doesn't! I get just as frustrated with American illiterates as I do the Chinese ones.

We get so many Chinese because they have a culture of cheating on applications... Tests and schooling are so, so, so important over there that it becomes more important to win than to actually learn the content (I've taught over there too).

Getting accepted, or at least continuing your education is such a high pressure situation over there. It effects the course of your entire life, and your parents are right there to breathe down your neck. It's really stressful for the students.

You end up getting applications that were written by someone other than the actual applicant.

Yep. As the resident English major in my geology department (double major) I was the go to for literally everyone to have their papers reviewed and whatnot. I don't understand how some of them even go into college, let alone graduated, with their sadly lacking writing skills.

To be fair, scientific paper writing is really its own category. Papers are meant to be read and assessed by peers in the field, not so much people of the general public. The thing you have to understand is that saying something doesn't make it true. It's the whole issue of news layman's science and the news reporting a new cause of cancer every week. The fact is that most people are not knowledgeable enough or able to evaluate cutting edge scientific research and the people who are can probably only do so in a few select areas of study. Are some researchers better writers than others? Sure, that's a given with any field and form. However, what makes a good scientific paper is not how many people enjoy reading it, it's how it affects research to come. A good scientific paper makes others want to replicate the results and if that can be done, then develop the principles or techniques discovered.

The problem is, at some point you have to give that information to someone who is equipped to DO something about it. And at that point, the ability to convey the information in a way that's easy to understand, engaging, and truthful is vitally important. It's no good finding out that, say, cigarettes are killing people if every time you take the research to a politician, their eyes glaze over and they fail to understand the problem.

This isn't the responsibility of the research scientist. This is the responsibility of a political advisor or journalist. One of my friends is currently a post doc. We got our M.S. degrees together and then he went on to a PhD and now post doc position. He spends 80 hrs every week working on his research and writing. He has to in order to stay competitive at this point in his career. When all the experiments are done he goes through the laborious process of editing and getting it published in a reputable journal. He'll hopefully have 5 papers published in about 2 yrs. In between all that, his research may get presented in the classroom, at conferences, or in "spotlight" articles written and published by the university. During those he'll think about dumbing it down. Oh, and btw, his funding just got cut. So now my friend is also concerned about submitting more grant proposals than he originally went after.

At the end of the day, he doesn't have time to sit down and think about how he can make his research easily consumable by the public or interjecting fluffy prose into his work (which would get thrown out anyways). And that's ok because it's not his job. If something he publishes makes waves then it might make sense to sit down and dumb it down for the general public.

But in reality, if anybody is to help bridge the gap between science and the public it should be journalists. A journalist spends their entire career taking stories and making them consumable. Are they incapable of reading a scientific paper for the highlights?

Putting the onus on journalists to interpret scientific texts and translate them for the masses is doomed to failure.

It's not about 'fluffy prose' so much as it is about presenting an idea in an engaging and eloquent way. It's simply about making people sit up and listen, and importantly it's about making ALL people sit up and listen, not just the scientific community.

Maybe if your friend was better with his presentation/writing/people skills his funding wouldn't have been cut. But then, I don't know him or his situation so maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. My experience though is that the politics of these things has more to do with the outcome than merit.

In all fairness, BrckT0p has a legitimate point - actual researchers already have a wide range of responsibilities and tremendous workloads. The text of papers can certainly be improved, but adding yet another damn obligation is the last thing we need.

Exactly this, maybe instead of focusing on the "poor" writing skills of scientists they should focus on the scientifically inept English majors. I think it's laughable to believe scientists need to do anything other than what they're already doing. I don't know a single grad student (engineering) who managed to publish a poorly written paper but I know plenty of English/liberal arts majors who couldn't accurately summarize a scientific paper to save their lives.

Scientific papers are all about relaying information on the background, experimental/statistical design, results, and conclusions as accurately and concisely as possible. You don't fill a scientific paper with beautiful prose because it retracts from the accuracy.

Unfortunately the issues of clarity and soundness of the results, and the issue of engaging writing cannot be completely resolved. Of course, groundbraking work will eventually make its way to the top, and bad science will decay, but for the most part, the impact of a paper depends on how many people it will reach, which is a function of how much other researchers enjoy reading it, then share it with peers, etc.

I know, I am a scientist and I also read like that. I wasn't referring in the article about the prettiness of the prose, but rather to making a compelling and interesting point with your data by posing an existing conflict in the literature, or in observing the world, and then showing how your data solves that conflict.

The thing is, raw or summary data is not information. It becomes information once it is framed in a meaningful way. Precisely that framing is something that many scientists, including myself, often struggle with, both in writing and in reading other academic papers.

It's not so much that scientists need to share their papers with their peers. That is really the function of scientific journals. And if a paper doesn't get published in a journal of note, then it probably has some bad science not to mention bad communication and/or writing.

Immediate influence has much more to do with who reads it and who shares it, yes. But as I mentioned above, that's layman's science. Those kinds of studies probably won't have much lasting impact.

Here are some articles that pop up when I searched google news for science:

"Why does stepping on a Lego brick hurt so darn much? Science!"

"Science: Your new fitness tracker will not work miracles"

"This is your brain on selfies: The science of self-portraits, faces, art ..."

Of course these aren't scientific papers, but I would guess any that these articles used (if any) would be just as relevant.

The fact is, what the majority of people want to read is not what real scientific papers are. A scientific paper is like a textbook. They try to condense as much information as possible and explain it in a way so that it is understood. A good scientific paper isn't shared to millions, its cited, used by others to do research and write more papers.

Now, I'm nowhere near literate enough in any scientific field to point out examples of great papers, but my father happens to be a molecular biologist. One of the more important projects and papers he was a part of was the cloning of the gene FOXP3. He's mentioned that particular paper had over five thousand citations. His words not mine, I can't verify the validity of that statement. He's also often mentioned that he believes someone will win a Nobel Prize for that research (or at least research related to that research,) just not him. Anyways, here's a link:

There are literally millions of papers published every year, many of them don't reach more than a handful of people. In one of my fields alone there are 20 000 articles published every year in good quality journals, and that number is increasing at an exponential rate. While it is hopeful to think that once published, a paper is "out there" and it should affect and influence other researchers, the simple truth is that more often than not it dies a quiet death. Whether and how many researchers it will reach is no longer a question of where it is published. It has a lot to do with name recognition, for example, but when you lack that, clarity and the "engaginess" of writing is a huge factor.

Ah, thanks for the detail on the situation in psychology. On further examination it looks like I've fallen for a bad headline in a non-refereed source. Nice to know things aren't quite as bad as I thought.

And a lot of them really don't deserve an additional spotlight. It's a depressing thing to think about but a lot of published science papers only serve to help the scientific community inch forward.

Every person who publishes a huge groundbreaking discovery is standing on the shoulders of people who published boring and mundane findings. Those mundane findings may have helped someone ask the right question or have the right method to test it. And you know what, those papers are extremely exciting to the people that need them. Just not to the general public. And expecting them to be beautifully written is almost like rubbing salt in an already open wound. When writing a paper like that, researchers know it's not going to be read by anybody outside of their peers.

I understand where you're coming from, because I've been there myself, but I really think you're romanticizing scientific publications a bit. JA Fodor's first publication has been cited 6 times. Compare that to a paper he published 28 years later that has been cited 3776 times. I imagine at some point during his career he started receiving more recognition, more funding, and was able to take more time on his publications.

I'd also point out that the inverse of this is not entirely desirable. Fantastic writing can lead people to feverishly believe false things. It can also be a mask for bad science.

No, we need sort of in-betweeners who can tell the stories science needs told while keeping science boring enough to not be manipulated by good prose.

This comes from someone who has read hundreds of dry boring academic papers. I study and love economics, but the worst thing that happened to economics was story. Story has proliferated endless pseudoscience and nonsense.

Good point. As any other technique, it should be used in moderation. But the main point is that without a story data is meaningless and whether it will be influential in the field depends on a great degree as to how well it is presented.

As a scientist and a writer, could not agree more. And it's not even just about reaching the layman; i've known many academics who simply could not communicate their ideas even to others in the same field. Science is about collaboration, and collaboration is about communication. So many research scientists scoff at the idea of working to improve their written communication, but the truth is if you can't communicate your ideas, you're a shitty scientist.

source: I eventually left academia and got a job as a science writer for almost seven years. Now i'm a teacher.

That's exactly what motivated me to write this piece. As a scientists I have had my fair share of reading bad articles where you have to go and do detective work to determine whether you can take home anything meaningful from the paper.

What is the status quo? What is wrong with the status quo? How does this new paper go beyond the status quo?

While I agree with a lot of the article, this part is a bad idea. It's a very bad attitude to have that all research should challenge the status quo. There is plenty of research to confirm that tried to discover something new, but failed, and ended up confirming what we already know. That research is still important. The research that shows your experimental cancer cure doesn't work is still important.

Research that merely exists to deny a hypothesis should still be published, and you shouldn't use fancy writing to try to hide the fact that, well, your experiment didn't really work.

It's also important to remember that it will probably only be other scientists reading the full paper anyway, and a few journalists and politicians maybe. Most people will read news stories about the paper - in which case, it's not the paper that needs to be well written, but the article about the paper.

As someone with a PhD in Physics, and that works as a research scientist, I'm torn on what you're saying here. On one hand yes, there are poor writers in science (however most reputable journals will purge those, so you generally will only see those as a reviewer). On the other hand, I completely disagree with the approach you are going for here. Science is not some Hollywood movie schlock; it is supposed to be presented in an unbiased way. Someone dramatizing their research will only lead me to mistrust them. Yes, you must present the problem you are trying to solve. Yes you must show that it is an important problem. However if you start telling me a story, I will assume it is an anecdote to prove a point (which is better left to the presentation at a conference) or that you have no good data.

There is a reason the standard format of a paper goes: problem statement, background on other research, your proposed solution to problem, details on solution, application to synthetic data (if possible depending on your field), application to real data, conclusions, and recommendations. That is your story. It is straightforward. All writing should be to the point and unembellished. I'm here to see your solution/data and conclusions. If I'm interested, I will then look at the details of how it was carried out so I can better understand it.

Dramatizing science is great when speaking to the public. That's why scientists like Richard Feynman, Stephan Hawking, etc. are beloved: because they can take complex physics, and explain it as a simplistic story to others. However they also wrote real scientific papers whose prose and content is much less dramatic, actually technical, and full of data/math.

We are not saying things that are much different. Even though the standard format of a paper really goes the way you describe it, how to implement it in every specific case is a storytelling problem. The same story can be told in many different ways, in some more successfully than other. I myself have often struggled with writing precisely because of that - I've done the research, I know why it was motivated and I know the data is worth publishing, but when it comes to how to present it best, that's more tricky. Every issue can be framed at many levels, from the very minutia of a specific problem the data is solving, to its grander implications. As long as you are not overstating those implications, it is a good idea to aim high.

I am a science writer and I personally hate shifting through academic papers for story ideas. They're great for background information but I find my best story kernels come from talking to the researchers themselves. In my experience, when I interview them they are always so articulate about why they are doing what they are doing that as long as I have the ability to sit down with them and talk to them about their work, I can pull a story from anywhere.

This is exactly what I mean. Scientist leave and breathe stories, it is why science is so satisfying to us. But when it comes to writing we try to choke those stories out, lest we be perceived the wrong way. I have been very inspired by many talks I've attended, but rarely from the articles that supposedly present the same content.

In college I had a professor that was a complete authority in a particular IT field. He wrote the official books for it and all. I swear I (and all of the other students past, during, and after me) understood close to nothing of what he wrote. The worst part was that that was the same language he used on his lectures.

One day, after he went off a few minutes explaining something, we were all dead silent for what seemed an hour, then a classmate raised his hand and said "Could you explain this again, but with different words, because it sounded really important but I understood nothing of what you said."

We all broke the silence in laughter. All expect our perplexed professor.

All scientists should be competent technical writers. We're too focused on CTR at the highschool level and most undergraduate writing courses are about catch-up and reading comprehension.

Org comm and technical writing, with a bit of rhetoric sprinkled in and a strong focus on killing bad papers in front of live audiences to prove a point, would be more effective. We don't need to forcefully insert the outdated workshop style of creative writing into STEM to make better writers, we just need to acknowledge that writing is a craft that STEM needs to be proficient in.

Disagree. I worked with one, he wanted me to teach him how to write. He was terribly frustrated, and I thought that it was unfair. He was a terrific scientist, creating data, I mean, setting the situations and combining all the possible variables, collecting, letting things to happen, having patience... all the stuff. He was very good at that. He then had to write reports, and he did it presenting info as raw facts. No rhetoric. And why should he use it?

Do we really have to turn everything into a TV show, or can we have different kinds of intelligences?

I'm a bit conflicted about this. I still love the ideal of the Renaissance polymath, a man or woman who demonstrates mastery in several disciplines. However the bar for mastery was lower 500 years ago, especially in the sciences, because our knowledge wasn't as deep then. I'd like to say there's no reason your scientist acquaintance couldn't also become an excellent writer, but the time spent mastering the craft is time he might better spend on research.

Unfortunately, we really do have to turn everything into a narrative. Stories are how we make sense of the world, and in the absence of facts and evidence we tend to make shit up because we'd rather have a bad story than no story at all.

However, we can still have "multiple intelligences", or at least have specialization. Why can't scientists and writers collaborate? Why aren't journalists better educated in the sciences and offered specialized training for science reporting? I don't see any reason why not other than the demands of capitalists and the meaningless and ruinous war between STEM and the humanities.

I spent close to a year working as a ghost writer/editor for a fair few scientific papers in order to improve the general writing of them.

Never touch the hypothesis or arguments or results, just the language, in order to make them more accessible to people outside of the core sciences as well as keep up a reader's interest.

Was bloody hard work with little reward but still very interesting. Mainly because you have to keep the core of the work intact but make the wording, syntax and overall flavour a little more emotive & engaging. A hard thing to balance, especially if you lack the time/energy for extensive rewrites (not to mention dealing with temperamental academics).

Some were but most were just people who had been working in their fields for over a decade and never knew how to write any other way than "dry".

The most basic way to explain it is that I take the introduction sections & completely rework them to attract interest, then tidy up things line by line so they flow well and keep people's attention. Then usually finish by fixing the conclusion sections by framing the argument/hypothesis/result a little better without altering what they actually are.

Unfortunately can't post any examples of my altered work due to Non-disclosure Agreements & not being particularly happy with a lot of my work due to constantly having to change them to suit what my clients wanted -more so when they kept changing their minds.

Of course, that's understandable. Actually, having a person like you in a lab might be a great asset. There's no need for scientists to be jack-of-all-trades. But as long as most scientists write their own articles, they should get better at it for all our sake.

Anyone who is interested in learning this kind of writing should check out Writing For Story by Jon Franklin. He won two Pulitzers writing science pieces for the Baltimore Sun. He has a 5-step, 15-word outlining process that really focuses you on the conflict-resolution narrative process. He also derived his rules from fiction writing techniques.

I'm a former journalist now working public affairs for a government lab. I'd make this book mandatory if I could.

I can get behind this idea if they're telling stories to the populous at large. I completely disagree when taking about academic papers. The non-scientists of the world should be told the story in a way they can follow without needing another 8 years is schooling. This will also help get more people interested in science and, in turn, more science funding.

Academic papers above all else must be clear. Using analogies and metaphors and poetic license goes against that. In fact, turning an experiment into a story would actively harm the science as it would add a layer of deciphering on top of what's really going on. If I said I poured 8mL of 8 mol hydrochloric acid into a solution of 1.3 L of deionized water and 200 mL of sulfur nitrite, then that's what happened. If I start talking about "and then poisoned water was enveloped in the loving embrace of the Queen's Rouge", then it's a lot harder to follow directions.

Oh, when we talk about the methods section of a paper, I completely agree. Clarity above all else. Things holds for the whole paper in fact, as you note. What I mean is, that when it comes to introducing the topic, and discussing the results, one should be able to tell a "story" similarly to how one does in fiction - introduce a conflict, then present a climax, then show how the conflict is resolved by the data. This does not mean, that clarity should be sacrificied for beautiful language, which is a matter of prose. But in structuring the text, scientific authors should be mindful of what they want to say with their data.

I heavily disagree. Sure, they should be competent writers but they shouldn't write like narrative writers.

Scientific writing and business writing has to be different from narrative writing because they should simply relay the relevant info in the clearest, most efficient, and the most relevant way as possible.

This is because while narrative writing can leave it up to readers to determine exactly what's occurring in the writing, but scientific and business writing should not do that at all whatsoever.

I'll be impressed if you can string together a dozen sentences in any field without some manner of narrative organization. I'll admit that some scientific papers do, the wholly incoherent ones.

Each of my group’s papers now starts with a storyboard session at a whiteboard. I pretend to be a big-time Hollywood producer and ask the Ph.D. student or postdoc to play the role of would-be movie director pitching a new movie to me. Their pitch must answer three questions: What is the status quo? What is wrong with the status quo? How does this new paper go beyond the status quo?

There is nothing in the above storyboarding session that even implies a lack of clarity, a lack of efficiency, or a lack of relevance. I'd argue that such a process is what produces those things.

The problem is that in the long run, as far as audiences go, the scientific community is the least important audience. To use the analogy of cigarettes and cancer, it matters not one iota if the entire scientific community knows that cigarettes cause cancer if they can't relate that information to lawmakers and the community at large in an engaging, meaningful way. If scientists lack the ability to relay their findings in a way that engages their audience and motivates them, then their research is worthless because nothing will ever be done about it. No point curing cancer if you can't convince anyone you've done it.

I completely disagree with this and I think you're mixing up few different things here but I'll answer tomorrow cause I'm off to bed and this comment I'm leaving behind is pointless and I should have just replied tomorrow but I already clicked on it and the orange icon is gone so if I didn't do this 9/10 I would have forgotten it tomorrow.

Most scientific papers will only ever be read by scientists. The number of papers that show how to cure cancer are vastly outweighed by the number of trials where they tried a potential cure for cancer and it didn't work. Those are still important, but it's mostly other scientists who are going to read them.

Not all research is groundbreaking, and using fancy writing to make your research seem more important than it is will always be a bad idea.

When I wrote for a newspaper, whenever I approached researchers, surveyors, and other such types they would always have a story for me that they had published but nobody cared. The phone number of a university research body, even better if one can contact faculty directly, is actually one of the tools every journalist should have because it's a constant and reliable source. Even better, readers love "a new study shows" stories.

In academic contexts? No. Of course some minimum writing quality is necessary (you need to be understood by the people you're writing for), but researchers most write for their peers. It would be unproductive to turn each paper into something a total laymen would get.

Now, if we're talking about broader divulgation of ideas, absolutely. People who turn complex ideas into simple ones are awesome. It's no accident that Carl Sagan is a hero for some.

Good article. Thanks for sharing. I work with many academics, and even though they have really good ideas and worthwhile research, it's a struggle to get their work published due to poor writing skills. Writing courses need to be better integrated into science education.

Yes and no. You need to be able to communicate effectively, but it isn't a story. I don't like when science is sensationalized. It has its place at the stage when concepts are disseminated to the general public, because that keeps people engaged, and helps keep the public scientifically literate, but raw science should aim to be mostly dispassionate.

On the bus this morning, I overheard a conversation with some douche doing his masters in some social science, and it was insanely transparent how much his own opinion and political leaning went into his work. People forget that social scientists are still scientists. They still gather data to reach their conclusions. If you get storytelling involved, it encourages a manipulated truth. Even in the natural sciences, at the fringes, storytelling can sway opinion undesirably. Funding goes here or there because of a better narrative? No thanks... Let's leave the storytelling for the DeGrasseeeeee Tysons and the Carl Sagans and the Bill Nyes

While I'm a huge proponent for being well rounded, often times what makes someone a great scientist does not require communications skills outside their field.

When speaking with other scientists in their field I am certain they are very articulate and engaging, but to be able to translate what they are doing into terms we can understand is a skill in and of itself. It's what makes Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson so beloved because they can explain complex systems in simple terms.

the problem these days seems to be that the main people writing this stuff (even in journals) are non-scientists. the fact is a lot of the journals that were written by scientists got overtaken because they couldnt generate money. they werent as accessible, and they werent as well written but you got the word straight from the horses mouth, so to speak. The problem was that this took more effort from the reader, in order to understand what was being said. This is a problem because water flows downhill. people are going to follow the easier path. makes sense - we are animals after all. unfortunately we can blame the scientists for being poor writers, the writers for being poor scientists, or the readers for being too passive but these things a largely inevitable. oh well.